Days after the 2020 election, Donald Kirk Hartle told Las Vegas news station, KLAS 8 News Now, that someone had stolen his late wife’s mail-in ballot and returned it to Clark County election officials; his wife died in 2017.
Authorities began investigating the incident and on Thursday, the Nevada attorney general’s office announced it had filed two charges of voter fraud against Hartle, alleging that he forged his late wife’s name to vote with her ballot.
“Voter fraud is rare, but when it happens it undercuts trust in our election system and will not be tolerated by my office,” Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, said in a statement. “I want to stress that our office will pursue any credible allegations of voter fraud and will work to bring any offenders to justice.”
Thinking he was slick and helping out Derp Leader win the Silver State, which he didn’t, Hartle allegedly voted twice, including once in his late wife’s name, between Oct. 26 and Oct. 30 of last year, according to a criminal complaint.
Nevada secretary of state’s office carried out the investigation. Ironically, Nevada’s GQP criticized the office for not doing enough to investigate voter fraud allegations and used this incident as proof that voter fraud was alive and kicking in Nevada.
In a tweet that obviously hasn’t aged well, Nevada’s GQP posted last year the following:
Last year, White Supremacist Fucker Tucker Carlson used Hartle’s claims to bolster Trump supporters’ assertions that widespread voter fraud could have swayed the 2020 election results. Carlson declared something that would wind up being prescient: “We don’t know who did this,” he said. “We wish we did, because it’s fraud.”
If convicted, Hartle faces a prison sentence of up to four years, along with a fine of up to $5,000.
